Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

So pretty much your argument boils down to, "such a lookup table cannot exist, therefore any argument using it is irrelevant." Note that even Scott Aaronson disagrees with you in the article you cited.

If we were having this debate in the XVIII-th century, you could equally as well assert that any machine capable of playing chess should be considered a person. The motivation is exactly the same as with the Turing test: so far only humans can play chess, humans are sentient, QED.

Say someone said, "But what if a machine used a minimax algorithm." To which you could respond, armed with your knowledge of XVIIIth century technology, "Such thing cannot exist therefore it's an irrelevant question."

As for the creation of such a table, not that I consider that question particularly relevant, but here it is: Say a crazy scientist in the future created a program that actually simulated a human brain, then ran it (on future super-fast hardware) on every possible input (once again, the size of the input is bounded by the maximum length of a conversation a human can have), and stored the results on future super-large hard drives. Then he deleted the human brain simulation program, and gave you just the lookup table. The act of deleting the original program we may very well consider murder. But what about the generated lookup table?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: